Dell Is Back In The PC Gaming World

Dell has long had a stable of powerful mainstream laptops that could handle games, its Inspiron 15 gaming laptops and its Alienware enthusiast line-up, but in recent years it's been missing an appealing desktop machine that's affordable enough for casual buyers but powerful enough for today's demanding titles.

Until now. The Inspiron Gaming Desktop is the first Dell machine using AMD's Ryzen CPUs, and it's built to allow gamers to upgrade their own PCs in the future, too, with headroom for dual graphics cards and cooling systems to handle any components.

Dell has been out of the gaming desktop space for years in its Inspiron line-up, and even the company's XPS machines only include a single XPS Tower with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 being the most powerful internal graphics card on offer in the stock configuration (for circa-$2000) and a GTX 1080 being an expensive further upgrade.

What's most interesting about the Inspiron Gaming Desktop, though, is that it eschews Intel's Core processors for AMD's more affordable multicore Ryzen. The Inspiron will also have two PCI-E graphics card slots for SLI (or CrossFire) graphics, although it won't launch with dual cards as an out-of-the-box option -- so you'll have to install your own.

Even more promising, though, is the message that Dell is sending with the Inspiron Gaming Laptop. It's an affordable machine to start with, but has the power (up to 850 Watts) and the cooling (better ventilation than any other non-Alienware desktop from Dell), the base components (up to 32GB of DDR4) and the ease-of-use to let casual gamers install and upgrade their own components as they mature into fully-fledged PC fanatics.

The Inspiron Gaming desktop will launch "in the coming weeks" worldwide for a starting price of $US599. We're tracking down any Australian-specific info and will keep you updated as it comes to light. Stay tuned for our hands-on experiences!

AMD's Polaris RX500 series graphics chips and Ryzen CPUs make for a surprisingly gutsy set of new all-in-one Inspiron AIO PCs from Dell, too. There's a 24-inch (starting at $US699) and a 27-inch (starting at $US999) introduced today at Computex, with the smaller screen a Full HD one and the larger with the option to jump straight to 4K. Both have Windows Hello cameras and microphone setups that allow far-field Cortana voice recognition, so you'll have all the bells and whistles that come with Windows 10 to play with.

That Inspiron 27 7000 AIO in particular looks the goods: it's the world's only all-in-one with an 8-core CPU, and you can spec it up with up to a RX 580 graphics card (a power-hungry 120-Watt chip in itself) and 32GB of DDR4 system memory -- it'll be just about the most powerful all-in-one you can buy. [Dell]

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